


New York From Above

by fathomfive



Category: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
Genre: Comics, Gen, Heroism, Metafiction, With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-11
Updated: 2019-01-11
Packaged: 2019-10-06 22:24:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,666
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17353742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fathomfive/pseuds/fathomfive
Summary: Peter B. Parker falls headlong into the wrong New York, one that's mourning its lost son.  The people he meets have some stories to tell.All of a sudden he feels a rush of homesick love for the New York he left behind.  His city, reek and riot and concrete.  By some miracle it hasn’t killed him yet.  So much of what he once had has run through his hands like water—but the city is the same in all its jagged glory, and he couldn’t give it up if he wanted to.If he could just see it again, from way up high.





	New York From Above

Take it from the top: it’s winter in New York. No snow yet on the ground when Peter and MJ get divorced, but there’s a bone-deep chill in the air. The sky is gray. With one signature, Peter ends what he always thought would be the best and longest chapter of his life. He starts the new chapter by moving into a shithole apartment, gaining fifteen pounds actual weight and a buck fifty in self-loathing, and becoming an unfortunate connoisseur of all the pizza places within ten blocks.

They all kind of suck. He’s about finalized that judgement when a swirling hole to nowhere opens up in his ceiling and drags him through.

He’s sucked backward out of the world and into nothingness, a severed webline trailing behind him. Only it’s not nothingness, exactly—as he hurtles along, sideways backwards upside down, familiar images blur past and repeat themselves, different every time. There are colors he doesn’t know the names of, voices from his memories. It’s like he’s being flushed down a cosmic toilet with a hacked-up demo reel of his own life. His sense of time falls away and he just keeps going, spinning through the clamoring void.

And then he falls out of the sky and lands face-first in a dirty snowdrift. It’s nighttime, and somewhere sirens are howling. When he scrambles to his feet the dizziness hits all at once, and he doubles over and empties his stomach of the fourth worst pizza in Queens. He stays bent over for a while, hands on his knees, one sneaker and one suited foot planted in the snow. Winter in New York.

When he looks up the skyline is wrong. It’s his city, he’d know it blindfolded (and the smell tells him more than enough, anyway). But there’s an urgent plucking at his senses; the spread of the buildings feels wrong. They’re too tall, too much glass. Burning against the night are electronic billboards with brand names he doesn’t recognize and a face he does, and a name he really, really never wanted to see up there in lights.

PETER PARKER, VIGILANTE “SPIDER-MAN,” DEAD AT 26

The kid in the pictures isn’t right either, but he’s—familiar. Peter was never blond but he smiles like that, crooked and open. Less often these days.

A police cruiser flashes its lights and pulls up to the curb beside him. The window rolls down, and an officer leans out and tacks him to the wall with her gaze.

“Hey buddy, you all right?” she says, in a tone of voice that means, “hey idiot, are you going to give me a reason to use the words ‘drunk and disorderly?’”

“Fine,” he rasps. “Sorry. Rough night.” He doesn’t tell her he’s just been transported to an alternate reality via The Meanest Swirly In The Multiverse. Anyway that’s just the working hypothesis.

Her gaze drops down his body. He sucks in his gut, which does nothing to hide the fact that he’s wearing his suit, his comfiest sweats, and one battered Chuck. The other one’s probably floating in the interdimensional void right now.

He sways. The cop squints at him, and then mutters something to the driver and gets out of the cruiser.

Her boots crunch in the thin layer of snow on the sidewalk. She approaches him slowly, like he’s a dog off the leash, and the part of him that isn’t busy going _what the fuck what the fuck what the_ mimics her body language, shoulders down. He can’t swing out of here without raising a lot of questions, and his head’s spinning too much for that anyway.

“It’s not a good night to be out,” she says. “You look like you’re working through some stuff. Get in back and we’ll give you a ride down to the Mercy Mission, okay?”

This New York already has a Peter Parker, blown up IMAX-sized to haunt it from above. That, and he didn’t entirely miss his feet when he threw up. He puts on his best pity-me smile.

“Okay,” he says. “Thank you, officer.”

He loses time on the way there, staring out the window at the blazing billboards. There’s Peter Parker, swinging through the city in blurry smartphone videos, patting babies on the head and snatching defenseless civilians from the jaws of danger. He’s funny. He’s beloved. He’s the whole package. And now they’ve stripped his anonymity away and everybody in New York knows that he was a grad student with a cowlick and a smiling, freckled wife. Peter couldn’t be any more anonymous here, in a universe where he doesn’t belong, but he feels—flayed. It’s like being naked in your dreams, in the moment before everyone sees.

He watches his doppelganger’s face flash by, over and over again. When the cruiser stops and the passenger door thumps shut, he jolts back to awareness. The cop raps her knuckles on the window.

He lets her guide him out of the back seat and down a recessed flight of stairs: the entrance to a church basement. In the cramped entry hall is a sign that reads, _All God’s Children Are Welcome at the Mercy Mission._ A volunteer shows him the bathroom. As the door shuts behind him, he hears the two women murmuring to each other, “…pretty wasted…sad…I know. Looks just like him.”

He gulps from the faucet and lets the cold water run over his face. There’s no saving the shoe, but he can’t bring himself to get rid of it. He ties a loop in the laces and carries it back out with him. 

The shelter volunteer is waiting for him outside. She tells him that her name is Carla, there’s soup if he wants it, and people who get physical with other people get the cops called on them. “And they don’t have soup in the drunk tank,” she says, and winks at him. He gives her his best approximation of a smile.

The entry hall opens onto a long, low basement room full of cots sardined together. At the far end a volunteer is pouring cans of soup into a slow cooker. Heads turn when Peter enters, and then turn away again. He perches on the nearest unoccupied cot and looks up at the detailed carving of Jesus on the cross that hangs above the soup table. The poor guy’s face is twisted in an expression of operatic misery, eyes raised to the stucco ceiling five inches above. Peter isn’t a very good Jew, but he’s probably still too Jewish to be here.

Because there’s fuck all else to do, he gets soup. The red and white cans stacked beside the slow cooker say _Crandall’s,_ which is viscerally upsetting. If God is here it’s because he decided to roll Peter for change and then kick him down a flight of stairs, metaphorically speaking. He _wishes_ he only got kicked down a flight of stairs. His soup comes in a Styrofoam bowl with tiny yellow flowers printed around the rim.

The guy in line next to him is wearing a red hoodie with a familiar spider emblem. “Nice sweatshirt,” Peter says.

The guy clocks his suit and grins. “Yours looks cold, but you do you, man,” he says. He nods back at the cots. Peter follows the gesture and sees more red and blue, web patterns and spiders peeking out from under pant legs and parkas. There’s a girl in an oversized Spidey t-shirt, a guy rocking gently on his cot with a web-patterned blanket over his shoulders.

“Oh,” Peter says.

“Yeah,” the guy says. “You know, I met him once.”

“What was he like?” Peter can’t stop himself from asking.

“Kind of a smartass,” the guy says. “He bought me a taco. I thought he sounded real young, but I didn’t think—I don’t know, man.” His expression tightens. “He was just a kid. It’s a hell of a city that does that to a kid.”

“You’re telling me,” Peter says. “It’s a million things going wrong every day, and at the end of it people still die. You don’t _save_ that. You can’t. You just buy time.” And he’d bought a lot of it, for MJ and Aunt May and everyone else, but that ran out too.

The guy fishes around in the box of plastic utensils, pulls out a spoon, and jabs Peter in the chest with it.

“Not what I said, man,” he says, and locks their gazes. He’s a skinny guy, mixed-race, with graying hair and too-wide eyes. “Not what I said. If that’s what you really think, what the hell you wearing this for?”

“For the range of movement,” Peter says, nonplussed.

“Sure,” the guy says. “No offense, but you don’t look so aerodynamic.”

“Rub it in, why don’t you,” Peter says. “I just meant that there are things you can’t save anyone from.” Did he think about that when he was twenty-six? Did he know, really know, that there would come a last loss no one could fight? He can’t remember.

The guy shrugs. “Like I said, you do you,” he says. The line moves on.

Peter goes back to his cot and eats Crandall’s chicken noodle soup, which contains mushrooms for some reason. He tucks his feet up on the crossed legs of the cot frame and listens to people chatter, warmed and made talkative by the food. They tell stories about Spider-Man.

Jacket guy is called Greg, and he is not the only one Spider-Man bought a taco for. Apparently the guy was a really big fan of this one food truck in the West Village. T-shirt girl is called Steph and once she saw Spider-Man leap from the top of the Woolworth Building and she yelled “do a flip” and he waved and did a flip, just for her. That one makes Peter pause because he’s done the same thing countless times, for strangers with their phone cameras all across the city.

In fact, it’s weirdly easy to imagine Peter Perfect Parker doing the same things Peter’s always done. Joking and showing off, stopping to help or just shoot the breeze with strangers. Swinging across the city, always reaching out for the next connection.

Greg comes back over to him and says, “Hey, go see Carla up front. They got a donation bin, she’ll get you a jacket.”

“And cover up all this?” Peter says. “Thanks, I will.”

Carla gets him a jacket. Or, more accurately, she hoists a misshapen fatigue-green thing from the bottom of the donation bin and holds it up as high as her short arms will allow. She leans around it and eyes him skeptically.

“It’s a little long,” she says.

But it has lots of pockets, and the sleeves are long enough to hide the raised band of his webshooters. If it makes him look even more like a homeless person, well. That’s technically true in this universe.

“I’ll take it,” he says.

He goes back to his cot feeling slightly less naked. His remaining sneaker goes in one of the coat’s big pockets, like the world’s lamest souvenir. He’s almost done with his soup when agony rips through him from his fingertips to his gums to the tips of his toes.

It’s like the worst pins and needles he’s ever had, multiplied times a million across his entire body. Too-bright colors bloom in his vision; his spine feels like it’s being unwound nerve by nerve—and then it’s gone, and the world is still again. Greg and Steph are staring at him. Carla is running across the room towards them. There’s soup all over his lap.

“Hey, buddy,” Greg says. “You, uh. You okay?”

“Of course he’s not fucking okay,” Steph says. “He just—spasmed, or something. What the hell was that?”

“Uncomfortable,” Peter says, trying to dab soup off his crotch with the sleeve of his jacket. Panic flutters in his chest. He feels unsteady on the molecular level, like a Jenga tower balanced on top of a subwoofer. 

“If that felt as bad as it looked, you need to go to the hospital,” Greg says.

“If that felt as bad as it looked, he’d be dead,” Steph says. Carla comes trotting up, staring at Peter as if he’s grown a second head, or maybe turned blond.

“Ben,” she says, because of course that’s what he told her his name is, “do you have a history of seizures?”

“That was not a seizure,” Steph says. “Seizure-inducing, maybe. But not a seizure.”

“Okay, sure,” Carla says. “Fair enough. But do you know what the hell it was?”

“It reminds me of what happened the night—you know,” Greg says. “All those lights in the sky, stuff squirming and popping and turning into other stuff. Trippy.”

“Ben, are you on something?” Carla says. “No judgement here, I just need to know.”

Peter tries to get his breathing to slow down. No dice. He gets up instead, shoving past them, powering through the shakes until his legs take the hint and cooperate.

“Sorry,” he says. “I gotta go.” And then he’s through the door, to the tune of Greg saying, “Wait a sec, you need a bathroom buddy? No shame, I’ll go with you.”

Carla follows him into the entry hall. “We’re not going to force you to do anything, but I really think you need to see a doctor,” she says.

“I don’t have health insurance,” Peter says, and opens the door. The night air stings his face. He tries to zip the coat but it’s too damn long and he fumbles and gives up. Iced-over snow crunches underfoot as he steps outside.

“Ben, this isn’t a night to be out,” Carla says. “Not just because of the weather. We all lost someone. This city’s not the same.”

“No kidding,” Peter says, and keeps moving. Not in a cool purposeful way, more of an embarrassing cold-feet dance. He speed-walks around the back of the church, sliding a hand up one sleeve to prime his webshooter.

Carla keeps following him. She moves fast, for someone that short. “Call it corny, but that Parker kid made an impact on a lot of people,” she says. “We’re all carrying something heavy here. You don’t have to be alone with that, or, or, whatever else it is.”

They’re behind the church now, in a narrow street painted bluegreen by bodega neon. Peter looks up, sighting for a good target.

“Don’t worry,” he says. “You did your thing. I got my soup.”

“Ben, you’re not well,” she says.

“Yeah, I noticed,” he says. He fires his webline, feels it stick. “Thanks for the coat,” he tells her, and swings up and into the night.

Muscle memory helps him find his rhythm before long. From above, this New York is both dissonant and familiar. The city is spangled with light, lying low under winter haze, and dead Peter Parker’s face repeats itself on glowing screens all the way to the harbor. It must be past midnight by now.

All of a sudden he feels a rush of homesick love for the New York he left behind. _His_ city, reek and riot and concrete. By some miracle it hasn’t killed him yet. So much of what he once had has run through his hands like water—but the city is the same in all its jagged glory, and he couldn’t give it up if he wanted to. 

If he could just see it again, from way up high.

He keeps swinging, staying out of the light. The buildings get older and narrower as he moves toward the river, and in the shadow of a pedestrian bridge he sees a splash of red graffiti: _SPIDERMAN LIVES._

When he was twenty he could swing the city all night, no problem. And, well, he probably still could. Perks of having your DNA permanently altered. But on a night like this that’s the most depressing thing he can think of. He drops to the ground in a likely-looking alley and something wet immediately starts soaking through under his feet. For maximum stickage, the soles of his suit are not waterproof.

“Gross.” He makes another failed attempt to zip the hobo coat, then gives up and fastens the snaps instead. He pokes his head around the corner of the alley.

This is not a part of New York where the club kids run amok until dawn. There are a couple guys smoking by a parked car. One by one, the lights are going off in a store across the street. Once he’s close enough he realizes it’s a game and comic shop. The letters are peeling from the faded sign, and somewhere in the back of the building the last light goes off. His reflection jumps into view against the darkened glass.

He looks like death warmed over, and then stirred a little once you realize it was still cold in the middle and warmed over again. There’s a cut on his jaw that he didn’t notice. In the way of all his wounds it’s half-healed already.

Behind his reflection is a handwritten banner that reads, _Kirby Street Games ‘N Comics Remembers Spider-Man._ The display in the window is a selection of highlights from the run of _Amazing Spider-Man._ There’s a bound collection in the middle with Spider-Man on the cover, only his head and arms visible, sagging under the weight of a mass of metal and rushing water.

“It wasn’t like that,” Peter says.

“What, you got something against _If This Be My Destiny?_ ” someone says.

Peter considers the available replies, and settles on, “What?”

“Okay, so it wasn’t a fan favorite,” the stranger says. He’s pulling on gloves, keys jingling in hand—a heavyset Dominican guy in a Kirby Street Games hoodie. “But that collection’s all about the underappreciated gems, you know. You ask me, it’s peak Spider-Man.”

“Right,” Peter says. “Did you know this is the weirdest night of my life? And that’s saying something. Also, they took a _lot_ of artistic license there.”

“Uh, that’s kind of the point,” the shop owner says. “Once they pulled everything they could from reality, they went off-book. So to speak. _If This Be My Destiny_ is one hundred percent fiction, but without it, the whole Spidey narrative would be—something different. Thematically, I mean.”

“Right,” Peter says. “One hundred percent fiction.”

The shop owner squints at him. “Hey. You all right?”

“Why does everyone keep asking me that?” Peter says.

The shop owner presses his lips together. His gaze flicks down to Peter’s feet, and then back up again. “You got somewhere to go tonight?” he says.

“Yes,” Peter says. “For sure, definitely. I have a house, I mean an apartment, and I’m going there. Soon. There’s just something I have to do first.”

“In socks?” the shop owner says.

“They’re not socks,” Peter says.

“They look like socks.” 

Peter wrinkles his toes. His tolerance for the cold is pretty good, but he basically can’t feel them anymore. “They’re, you know, those foot glove things,” he says. “They’re ergonomic.”

“I think ergonomic is for chairs,” the shop owner says. 

“Chairs and shoes,” Peter says. “Look, mind your own business, okay? I just. I need the address. For where he’s buried.”

They stand there in silence for a moment, looking at each other. Peter pops the top three snaps on the hobo coat and pulls it aside to show the spider emblem on his chest.

“I have to go there tonight,” he says. “Then I’m going home. Honest.” Bullshit is one of the powers he was born with.

The shop owner gives him a long look. Then he swings the duffel bag off his shoulder and reaches inside. He hands Peter a pair of well-worn leather boots, heavy-soled. The label says _Doc Barton’s,_ which he tries not to think about.

“I think you need these more than me, man,” he says. “Hang on. I’ll write the address down.”

Fifteen minutes later Peter’s up among the rooftops again, the boots laced together and thumping against his chest with every swing. The coat flaps behind him, like he’s reliving the ill-advised cape phase all over again. When he touches down it’s behind a church steeple, because dead Peter Parker was apparently some kind of Baptist. The landing sends pins and needles lancing through his toes and the soles of his feet. He spends a couple idiot minutes hopping up and down in the snow, trying to pull the boots on while making as little contact with the ground as possible.

The grave isn’t hard to find. It’s the only one smothered in a mass of cards and candles and flowers and stuffed toys, a sea of tribute that stretches six feet in every direction. Helium balloons, wilted by the cold, hover low to the ground. 

He lurks in the shadow of the steeple for a long time before he can make himself get close.

Take it from the top: boy meets spider, boy’s life turns upside down and gets stuck that way. Boy saves the city, gets knocked down, gets back up again. Gets back up again. Gets back up again. Boy saves the city, says some really clever things while he’s at it, gets knocked down. Loses someone. Gets back up again. It’s pretty predictable. Except for a few details, he’s always known that this would be the last chapter. A nice headstone that reads, _Peter Stanley Parker, dearly beloved._

He kicks around in the snow until he finds a stone that’s the right size. He puts it on top of the headstone and retreats back into the shadow of the steeple.

He’s still there, neck-deep in self-pity and having a grand old time, when the kid shows up. He should have expected it, with the trail other mourners have left in their wake. He presses his back to the cold brick and watches as a child in an ill-fitting Spider-Man Halloween costume approaches the grave.

He halts at the front line of damp teddy bears and guttering candles, and starts talking. Peter can’t hear it too well, but from the forlorn slump of the kid’s shoulders, he either has a serious case of hero worship, or he’s yet another of those who met the guy in person. He leans a little closer, curious, and another world-bending spasm of pain tears through him. 

It’s like unseen hands are trying to fold him into origami, his limbs rebelling, static and bubbles and blazes of light all bursting across his vision. He’s panting hard when it lets up, stumbling out into the moonlight, just as he hears the kid say, “…thought you would be the one to teach me how this works.”

His spider-sense twangs like a key dragged along the strings of a harp. He reaches out, not quite knowing what he’s doing, and when his hand finds the kid’s shoulder the vibrations intensify until it’s almost too much to bear. The kid spins, faster than any kid should be able to move, and Peter webs him on instinct. Pain arcs through his body again, blue sparks showering between them, and the world goes dark.

He wakes up with a lot more bruises, and a lump of melting snow sliding gradually down the leg of his sweatpants. Also he’s tied to something, but that’s not a new one. His view of the room swivels gently, his toes dragging along the floor.

“Ow,” he says. “You treat all your guests like this?”

“Quiet!” says the kid in a panicked squeak, and then, _“Quiet,”_ in what’s clearly his best Adult Man Voice. “I’ll do the talking.”

“Okay, so talk,” Peter says. The kid stares at him, big brown eyes behind the cutouts of his Spidey mask. Their gazes meet, and he knows that they’re feeling the same thing. A thread stretched taut between them, plucked and singing. They’re the same. He doesn’t know how or why, but they’re the same.

Whatever Peter’s tied to rotates a little more. He’s staring at a vintage poster for _‘Round About Midnight,_ taped over somebody’s couch. He scoots his toes along the floor and tries to rotate back. 

The snow hits the cuff of his sweats and starts melting into his boot. He listens while the kid tries very very hard to interrogate him, but most of his attention is on the knot just within reach of his left hand. He works at it steadily until the ropes around his chest go slack, and then he wriggles free, which is not as easy as it used to be.

“Don’t watch the mouth,” he says, “watch the hands.” And then he’s out the window and down the wall, trying his damnedest to look like he knows where he’s going.

“You can’t just walk away!” the kid says, scrambling down the wall after him. _You can’t just walk away,_ says MJ in his memories, lovely as the day he first saw her. _You never could. It’s what makes you you._ There were tears in her eyes when she said it. She was voicing a truth that weighed on both of them, inexorable.

“Quiet,” he says.

The kid keeps following him, breathless. “But what about, with great power comes great—”

 _“Quiet,”_ Peter snaps. “If I never heard that one again.”

The snow lump finally gets small enough to fall out of the cuff of his sweats into the alley below. He realizes, abruptly, that this is his rock bottom: sideways on the wall of an apartment building that smells like old takeout, in the wrong New York, telling a scared kid that no, he doesn’t feel like being a hero today.

Doesn’t feel like getting up today. Hasn’t felt like getting up in a long time.

He hops to the next wall and keeps walking. The kid follows him, but doesn’t say anything. With every step he can feel the thread between them stretching thinner, a connection only half made but vibrant with potential. He climbs up onto the roof.

Stretched out below him is a city, not the right city but _a_ city, teeming with the hopes and fears of eight million people, bound in the threads of their shared lives. On his best nights he’s felt the whole thing hum, like it’s speaking to him. It’s why he took on this insane gig in the first place.

Because—the words Uncle Ben said to him didn’t really sink in until he saw them writ large in the web of cross-streets from Far Rockaway to Harlem, as seen from above. He was sixteen. He understood then that it was all connected, a web in which every deed reverberated, and if you had the power to make things better than you damn well should.

The kid hasn’t said anything for a minute now. Peter peers back over the roof to see him crouching on the wall below, his mask pulled back to reveal a round brown face and obstinate eyes.

He’s really fucking young. Young enough to know what’s wrong, and what’s right.

“What—what are you doing,” Peter says.

“Trying to make you feel guilty,” the kid says, with a come-at-me tilt to his chin. “Is it working?”

Peter glances back at the glowing tracery of the city below. Great responsibility is a bitch of a thing. But it’s also the only thing. It’s soup, and good boots, and stopping to tell someone your stories. It’s what catches him when he throws his body into open space over and over again. 

He’s largely failed to save what matters to him. But here in this city there’s another day that needs saving, for someone else. 

“Yeah, it’s working,” he says, and starts climbing back over the edge of the roof. “No need to get smug about it.” Take it from the top. Let go, leap off. 

It always starts with a fall, and, well. He knows how to take it from there.

**Author's Note:**

> I know zero about comics but I have a lot of feelings about a) burrito Peter not being able to catch a goddamn break, and b) stories that think about what kind of stories they are, and what their legacy might be.


End file.
